The Hardware Entrepreneur

This episode’s guest is Kistjan Vilosius of Katana, a startup from Estonia.

Working at a small-, medium-sized company, or startup you have to wear many hats and it happens often that there are simply not enough people to wear those hats. You have limited resources. Highly efficient way of working is therefore extremely important. How many times did it happen that you spent unexpectedly high number of hours trying to fix some issues when using your software, for example plain old spreadsheets, especially when those spreadsheets are connected, which handle different aspects of your business?

This episode’s guest is Katana’s co-founder and CEO, Kristjan. He has held different leadership positions in the corporate world as the group CFO then group CEO of Magnum, a multinational pharmaceutical retailer in the Baltics and Finland. Later he was the CEO of Up Invest family office investing in retail, media, healthcare and cleantech companies. Today he’s the CEO and Product Manager of Katana, a manufacturing ERP for makers, crafters, manufacturers.

We’ll talk about how they started out, back when Katana was just an idea. We discuss what solutions exist for managing inventory, production besides Katana’s solution. We go into details how their software works, the many integrations they offer now and they expect to offer in the near future. You’ll also hear about trends that you can expect in the b2c space.

Enjoy this episode.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• The story behind the first manufacturing and inventory management tool that helps small business scale faster [3:00]
• What makes Estonia one of the best countries to start a company [6:30]
• How Katana brings in the point of truth [8:54]
• Why focusing on a specific customer niche is a winning strategy for inventory management platforms [12:23]
• The ways in which Katana is trying to become an integrated app [18:08]
• How Katana supports manufacturers producing highly complex products [25:18]
• The differences between Katana and Excel that make your life and business easier [29:36]
• Trends for small manufacturing in 2019 and beyond [33:02]
• If you could go back in time in your 20s, what notes would you give yourself? [35:21]
• If you had to name a book, which one had the biggest impact on your entrepreneurial career? [36:46]
• Why make your leg day in the gym on Monday morning [38:24]
• How to bring out the best of people in an international team [39:40]
• What is the best way to reach Kristjan? [37:40]

My podcast guest is Pete Staples, co-founder and president of Blue Clover Devices with locations in San Francisco, Hong Kong and of course, Shenzhen, the Silicon Valley of Hardware.

This is an episode on some important aspects of production lines and its challenges. Without a production line you have no mass manufacturing so if you want to play in that field, it’s good to know about some current issues.

Pete’s company is originally and even now an ODM company. In this episode he will talk about what they do as an ODM. You’ll also find out about typical waste in production lines and what can go wrong with Work Instructions or SOP, Standard Operating Procedures that are typically used in production lines. Pete’s team has a solution to make teams’ life easier. Their product is for automating testing, but not the usual way which can set you back by a few hundred thousand dollars.

We’ve talked about many many more topics, enjoy.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• Why Blue Clover Devices are not afraid of competitors [3:25]
• The difference between ODM and CM and the benefits of using each of them [7:13]
• Why SOPs are good for consistency but becoming more and more obsolete for usage in Production Lines [9:53]
• A new level for remote work: “a teleporter” that automates the manufacturing and production process [15:40]
• How Blue Clovers Devices company applies the 10x improvement [22:00]
• If you could go back in time in your 20s, what notes would you give yourself? [27:45]
• If you had to name a book, which one had the biggest impact on your entrepreneurial career? [30:00]
• How staying fit during work time is good for both the employees and the company [32:07]
• How to keep the balance when shifting between two different cultural and business worlds [33:45]
• What is the best way to reach Pete? [37:40]

I have a very special guest, one of the pioneers of one of the most popular innovation frameworks these days: the lean startup framework. My guest is Ash Maurya, who along with Eric Ries, did some substantial work in this field, laying the foundations of this concept.

You’ll learn in this episode why this idea is still important today, especially in hardware field after it was born around the last financial crisis. You’ll get to hear also what companies are using it, some tactics you can use to make it work for you and also how others use it so you can get inspired. Ash will describe some of the steps, milestones you should hit during the development. In addition he’ll highlight some of the latest cutting-edge innovation topics he’s been working on which connects with my one of past episodes, episode 18 with Alan Klement when we discussed the Jobs To Be Done framework.

Enjoy this episode.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• The trigger behind the creation of the Lean Startup innovation framework [1:56]
• Some examples of big and small companies that prove Lean Startup principles are universal when applying the right tactics [7:24]
• Strategies that hardware startups use to go faster than their competitors [10:27]
• The three stages of Lean Startup, the risks associated with them and recommendations on how to move successfully through each one [16:18]
• Running Lean, Scaling Lean and the Customer Forces Canvas – when and how to use them [24:25]
• How a fisherman in South America surprisingly benefited from Lean Startup principles [29:11]
• If you could go back in time in your 20s, what notes would you give yourself? [34:08]
• If you had to name a book, which one had the biggest impact on your entrepreneurial career? [34:48]
• A routine hack for accomplishment-driven makers [36:25]
• Why sharing stories help us thrive in cultures with different nuances [38:00]
• What is the best way to reach Ash? [40:28]

My guest in this episode is Moritz Waldstein-Wartenberg of Mitte from Berlin, Germany.

We all drink water, mostly, I guess. I drink it in my tea, usually Fennel Anis Cumin bio tea, I drink it many times per day. Or I consume water in its pure form. But is water really pure? If it’s not pure, for example tap water, which we drink many times in Europe, how do you make sure you have a high quality water at home without going to the supermarket, paying for it and without taking, then throwing out the plastic bottles? And if you get it in the supermarket, is that good enough water for us?

Mitte addresses these points mentioned. With Moritz we talked about different technologies to purify water, how Mitte started out, the milestones they reached and how they got to the current investment round of 10 million. We also covered some of the strategies and tactics they used. We also touched on agile transformation, a topic covered in the last episode.

Enjoy this episode.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• What Mitte adds to their product that makes it unique and how they go beyond the standard for every user [2:40]
• Some very important actions to consider on your way to a successful crowdfunding campaign [8:55]
• Designing contracts when working with bigger companies as partners and other helpful skills in the initial start-up stage [14:56]
• A nature-like technology that’s a good offer for both people and the planet [19:28]
• The difference between working in silos and work streams [23:18]
• If you could go back in time in your 20s, what notes would you give yourself? [27:00]
• If you had to name a book, which one had the biggest impact on your entrepreneurial career? [28:00]
• Why morning routines are important for Moritz [30:33]
• Why diversity brings strength to companies and what it requires [31:28]
• What is the best way to reach Moritz? [33:51]

I’m back on this episode and you will hear about the continuation of the topic of the last published episode. What should you do once you know you have a problem worth solving and you validated what solution you should build with all the features? Should you just go ahead and develop the product based on the specs, the whole development potentially taking multiple years? What is some framework that’s being adopted by more and more organisations these days, such as by Tesla, Bosch, Mercedes Benz, BMW, Boeing, Saab Defense or also some of the smaller companies, startups? They realized you cannot keep developing and operating in a rigid plan-driven way since the whole world has turned upside down, speed of working has increased and if you don’t come out onto the market with a product faster than your competitors, you lose.

This episode is about agile transformation of organisations, especially their hardware development.

What hurdles have you seen in your transformation or in your wish to transform?

Enjoy this episode!

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

This episode features me and I’ll talk about topics that are especially relevant for technical founders.

Your product is not the product. Many of us in high tech entrepreneurship have a technical background, with years of academic training where we’ve been educated about how to build products, with all the technical skills needed for that. We know how to calculate many things, such as mechanical properties, we know how to create CAD drawings, and how to actually translate theory into practise by actually building stuff. But is entrepreneurship really about these technicalities, specifically hardware entrepreneurship?

In this episode I address 3 questions:

(i) if it’s not your product that matters, what matters than more?

(ii) once you have the basics of your business, should you rush to build and publicly release a fully-fledged product which perfectly reflects your vision?

(iii) what are some of the frameworks for some of the well-known hardware startups that make their business tick?

In this episode you can learn about how to find good ideas, why and how not to fall into the product trap, how Audi won the Le Mans competition without having the fastest car, how Tesla rolls out its products and many more.

Enjoy this episode!

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• How to hang a picture on the wall [2:00]
• Why constraints are actually helpful [5:18]
• Elements of a story about how an organization creates, delivers and captures value [8:00]
• How smart it is to tackle the biggest risk first [10:51]
• Typical business models for hardware startups [13:46]

I had Michael Corr as guest, who is the co-founder and CEO of Duro Labs from LA, southern California. I already had a guest from LA in episode 25, Shaun Arora of Make in LA, the hardware accelerator. Michael is also in a way supporting the hardware ecosystem, but he’s not from an accelerator. He’s helping hardware companies with their developments and he has a product for it.

His product is at the interface between software and hardware. He’s been deep in hardware development, designing and manufacturing all kinds of hardware products for more than 15 years both in the US and outside. Hardware products he has designed range from drones, IoT devices, wearables, telecom equipment, cleantech. His team is coming out now with a cloud-based product.

Many talk enthusiastically about digital manufacturing and that there’s a renaissance in manufacturing, but actually still too many use such “sophisticated” tools as email or simple spreadsheets. How do you avoid miscommunication between teams in design, in manufacturing, inside and outside your organisation? How do you make sure you can keep track of all the data you produce during your development without people working with inconsistent versions of your database? How do you circumvent getting inaccurate data, spec sheets, part numbers, drawings into your design? These are all some of the questions he addresses in this interview. Beyond these, we also talked about other pressing issues for agile hardware development a reality or why we don’t have revision control in CAD design similar to how it exists in software development with git repository.

Enjoy this episode!

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• The solution to a common pain point across various endeavors in designing and manufacturing hardware [4:30]
• Who can benefit from Duro and the variety of problems it can solve that differentiate it on the market [8:12]
• What some of the most used management tools cannot give to today’s engineers that Duro can [16:23]
• How the gap between prototyping and mass production stage is slowing down the hardware industry in its struggle to catch up with the software industry [20:25]
• State of agile development and which companies are making progress in this respect [27:24]
• Stages of the hardware development where agile will have the most impact [35:12]
• Why version management tools aren’t common in hardware development [42:12]
• If you could go back in time in your 20s, what notes would you give yourself? [46:06]
• If you had to name a book, which one had the biggest impact on your entrepreneurial career? [47:43]
• Why and when to be process-oriented [48:49]
• Being in different worlds for development and its challenges [51:08]
• What is the best way to reach Michael? [53:28]

This is a rerun episode after one month of no publishing. As mentioned in the last episode, I changed the publishing frequency to monthly. Why am I doing now a re-release of a past episode? Perhaps you’ve seen the recent report by HAX, the hardware accelerator based in Shenzhen, China and in San Francisco: their first hardware report in 2018. In the report they mentioned the importance of a great team when building a company and immediately this past episode with Alan Clayton came up in my mind, who’s the person assessing hardware startup teams’ healths. Since this is a very important topic, I wanted to bring it in focus again by re-releasing this episode.

Alan has been working for SOSV, the Venture Capital company, since its beginnings in 2010. You might know as SOSV as it’s the world’s top hardware VC. They’re special also in another aspect as unlike other VCs, SOSV runs accelerator programs, such as HAX, HAX Growth, RebelBio, IndieBio, Food-X, Chinaaccelerator, MOX. They are understandably very tech-focused and Alan Clayton is the person who understands people. This means he makes sure you have the right team to deliver the right results as otherwise things can and if they can, then they will go wrong.

The question we addressed in this episode is: how can you maximize your success with your team? You can learn in this episode about successful team’s composition, the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) for testing what areas the team covers, and also how this knowledge can help you pitch your idea better. So in essence we’ll go deeper than just talking about the left and right brain thinking.

Enjoy this episode!

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• Do you use your brain’s full capacity? - [3:27]
• What SOSV stands for and Alan’s role in the company – [6:38]
• Who is Ned Herrmann and how his work is helping startups work more effectively? – [7:48]
• At which phase of the startup process you will most surely need Alan? - [9:17]
• How does a startup founders’ assessment unfold? - [12:42]
• Which type of intelligence are you - Captain Kirk, Doctor Spock, Scotty the engineer or Doctor Bones? - [15:04]
• How to avoid conflicts and benefit from the team diversity at the early stages of a startup? - [21:38]
• What are the major success factors for hardware startups? - [24:58]
• What set of skills does a hardware startup CEO need to develop? - [27:20]
• A Star Trek crash course on pitching - [30:30]
• If you could time travel and go back in time, what notes would you give yourself? – [34:54]
• Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [35:39]
• Some cultural differences that Alan observed throughout his career – [36:46]
• Alan’s recipe for a good start of the day - [38:55]
• What is the best way to reach Alan? – [42:20]

My guest is Guy Zbarsky, co-founder of Keepgo, a firm that has been in business for about a decade.

Guy’s company is called Keepgo and this company name already suggests that they want you to keep going, everywhere you want to go to. Some of you know that well, I cannot live very long without traveling so their topic connected with me. I met their company via one of my trips at IoT Tech Expo in Amsterdam at the end of June this year. Their business operates in a fast-moving field, in telecom. This also means that Guy will share some interesting tips and stories, how they’ve been riding the telecom wave.

Some of the topics we cover are: where telecom business is heading to, especially the data connectivity aspect. Guy mentions some timelines he expects for the virtual SIM technology’s adoption. He also brings up when and how each of us will be able to start making money based on the emergence of virtual SIM. He also talks about the beginnings of his company and their pivoting a few times. Guy drops some tips too on project management-related tools he uses and is considering using soon.

I have an additional announcement in this episode regarding the publishing frequency. This is happening as I’ll be focusing on some other projects, too in the future. Are you angry or happy about it? Let me know by sending an email or via social media.

Enjoy this episode.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• Why Keepgo is an exciting company (for me)
• Problem they’re targeting – offering an alternative to the rip-off scheme by others
• Beginnings of Keepgo and its multiple pivots
• Virtual SIM technology to replace plastic SIM cards?
• Different virtual SIM technology standards
• What virtual SIM technology has to do with Airbnb
• Timeline Guy expects for virtual SIM’s adoption by the public and the bright future for all of us to make extra money
• Keepgo’s past and current uniqueness on the market
• Business tools Guy uses to manage his company
• The wisdom Guy would take back to his 20-year-old self
• His favorite book he uses for his business
• Guy’s daily habits and how they help him (re-)focus
• Cultural differences he highlights and how he thinks we can overcome those
• Guy’s last bit of advice, take home message – why you should start a business

Recently I participated in IoT Tech Expo Europe in Amsterdam on 27-28 June. It was a fascinating event to feel the pulse of the industry, how things stand and where the industry is heading to. In this episode I want to bring you some of the highlights, essential take home messages.

This event is one of the biggest ones of its kind in Europe with nearly 9000 attendees. It had a few sections, including AI, IoT, Blockchain. At least half of the exhibitors were related to blockchain. However, in this episode in order to have some focus, I’ll concentrate more on the former two fields.

Enjoy this episode!

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Enjoy and take a look at the highlights below to get a glimpse of topics discussed.

• What is the IoT Tech Expo in Amsterdam all about?
• When expectations and investments rise (too) high in AI/IoT
• Some healthy developments in AI – Aiir Innovations
• Need for investments in AI – Asgard
• Another application of AI/IoT – predictive maintenance
• Emerging startups at IoT Tech Expo and their use cases
• Interview with Aiir Innovations on their AI innovation and how the future of AI looks like